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Dedication

For my husband, Aled, and our children, Hedd Gwenno and Guto. Love and imagination are all you need.

ONE

THIS IS A LIST of what Marty’s grandad had:

• 1 pair of spectacles (one arm broken)
• 7 teeth
• One-room apartment above the Crown and Anchor Public House
• 1 broken outboard engine
• 457 tea bags
• 1 tub of powdered milk
• A lot of time
• 1 allotment for growing vegetables and flowers and such, with shed (with a giant map of the world nailed to the wall inside)
• 1 squeaky camping chair that tried to swallow you whole if you sat on it funny
• Very sparkly blue eyes
• 1 old trilby hat
• 1 Hodgkins & Taylor & Sons seed catalog
• 1 empty cookie tin

This may sound like a lot, but it kind of isn’t. Not compared to Marty’s mum. Marty’s mum had billions of things. Billions and trillions and infinity of them. I mean, I’d make a list, but even if you lived to be a hundred, I don’t think that you’d ever finish reading it, because Marty’s mum kept everything. Newspapers and holey shoes and rusty lawn mowers and unread books and broken picture frames and, well, EVERYTHING. When she used to be able to leave the house, she could never pass a dumpster on the side of the road without reaching in and bringing something home, and she got really stamp-footed and scared if you tried to throw anything away.